Justin W. Flory

What is the secret for maintainers to sustain newcomers in their communities? Many maintainers know about adding a CONTRIBUTING.md file to their project, but is this enough to effectively support and integrate newcomers into your project? In this session, Elizabeth Barron and Justin W. Flory will provide a baseline for newcomer onboarding in today’s landscape and a close look at the CHAOSS and Fedora projects as real communities of practice. While CONTRIBUTING.md files provide potential contributors with information and support to join the community, they have certain bounds. A poor onboarding experience can actually work against you and turn them away before their first contribution. Building an effective and inclusive onboarding process is crucial to ensuring a healthy open source community. In this talk, you will learn about: - establishing a baseline for what “newcomer onboarding” means in today’s open source landscape - implementing actionable steps to ease onboarding for newcomers and maintainers - two communities and their next steps for improving the contributor onboarding experience. Elizabeth and Justin will represent the CHAOSS Project and the Fedora Project as participants, maintainers, and leaders in the communities and how experiments with newcomer onboarding led to lessons learned and the growth of the contributor ecosystem.

Other people: Elizabeth Barron

Thanks for coming to the FOSDEM 2023 Distributions Devroom. Let us know what you liked and what we can do to keep the discussions continuing!

Other people: Shaun McCance siddharthvipul

The CHAOSS project represents a potential force for power and good in open source. This session includes speakers who took part in a two-year long reflection on DEI practices within the CHAOSS project. The session will help other open source projects in their work towards improving diversity, equity, and inclusion by exploring practices within the CHAOSS project first, then using those examples as points of reference for other projects. Our efforts have focused us on newcomer experiences, community surveys, and sustaining the people within the project. In particular, the session will discuss these efforts, aimed at answering the question of: How do we help open source communities to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive?

Intro: Our CHAOSS DEI reflection team is amazing. We have been able to work together over the last few years, building and establishing direction for the CHAOSS project and others. Our work has resulted in many improvements within the CHAOSS project as well as external engagements aimed at better centering DEI within open source.

Main idea 1: Supporting new contributors and making your onboarding process smooth helps with contributor retention.

• Supporting detail 1: Challenges include language barriers, time zones, access to tools from bandwidth limitations or other access limitations, merging in and accepting contributions in a timely manner

• Supporting detail 2: Helpful strategies include improving documentation, open office hours, welcome slackbot, accepting contributions of all kinds, having a newcomer space in slack/communication channels, onboarding calls

Main idea 2: Our two-year reflection process did not always go as planned.

• Supporting detail 1: Building newcomer experiences has been challenging. The CHAOSS global community has grown tremendously, for example, the African chapter has grown to over 180 members in the last few months– and as such, newcomer onboarding and paths to contribution became a priority for us. Our expectation was to make a difference and directly assist newcomers in CHAOSS since many of us can relate to their pain of getting overwhelmed by the many parts in CHAOSS. It is true that we made a significant impact; however, we had to reevaluate our first plan and improve on it. For example, office hours didn't get as much attention as we would have liked, so we adjusted the time and cadence, then went one step further with documentation diversity for newcomers (specifically the teams' sheet and quickstart for newcomers). More recently, we started a strategy document for newcomers' onboarding and have kickstarted newcomer onboarding calls.

Main idea 3: Strategic use of community surveys helps you to better understand the feelings, emotion, and qualitative feedback of the community.

• Supporting detail 1: Make sure the community survey is completely anonymous and no personal information will be collected, and is GDPR compliant. Access to data should be limited and only report aggregated data on a high level. Have clear goals for what you want to learn more about, but be open to organic community response. Also consider troll-ish responses, and follow set standards when asking about demographic data.

Conclusion: We have learned to be patient with our work. Advancing DEI in open source is challenging as we attend to corporate interests, community needs, and, most importantly, the safety of people for whom our efforts have an impact.

Other people: Kristi Progri Matt Ruth Ikegah Sean Goggins

This session will review the history of women’s contributions to Linux distributions and open source, how Linux communities are a catalyst for improving tech diversity, and what we can continue to improve to bring in the next generation of women FOSS contributors.

This session will review the history of women’s contributions to Linux distributions and open source, how Linux communities are a catalyst for improving tech diversity, and what we can continue to improve to bring in the next generation of women FOSS contributors.

Linux distributions are a hub for technical excellence and open source innovation. Most people think of our efforts around packaging, integrating new technologies in our distros, and building communities around what we do. But how our communities innovate goes beyond technology alone. There is also innovation around diversity and inclusion in our communities. For women, Linux distro communities can provide a place to learn about open source, start building a career, and growing their professional networks. The goal of this session is to call out women’s contributions in this space, highlight ongoing progress to make Linux communities more inclusive, and a wish list of things our communities could improve so the diversity of our community increases.

The future's looking bright for women who aspire to leave their mark in the world of Open Source. Let’s look at their contributions in distributions and FOSS spaces as we move at light speed from on-prem to cloud to edge computing.

Other people: Amita

Discuss importance of funding and talent allocated to community work when investing in DPGs. You can’t just invest in the bytes; the bytes have no value of their own. It is everything else around the bits and bytes that matter!

The Digital Public Good Standard is fast approaching its two-year anniversary. The Digital Public Good Alliance (DPGA) has built a registry of Open Source solutions and tools that address the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. But how do we know whether a DPG itself is sustainable? To date, we still don’t have a common way of measuring or knowing whether a DPG has what it takes to succeed and scale for different use cases. The variable for time remains unsolved in the current DPG equation.

For folks who participate in the funding and development of DPGs, how can we build better DPGs with open and inclusive communities? Are there pitfalls to avoid or key lessons to follow? Justin & Vipul will explore the life cycle of a DPG and why building in the open earlier builds better DPGs. This talk will look at DPGs and DPG nominees in different phases of development: early-stage, mid-stage, and late-stage.

Other people: siddharthvipul

Family Matters

Once upon a time, nearly 40 years ago, the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement began. As it gained momentum across the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there were inevitable conflicts of ideology and practice. This-License or That-License, a business model that works for some projects but not others, and how an individual Open Source maintainer still manages their own sustainability in society.

Despite the fractures that we have felt in our growing family, we have been consistently pulled together by a force of gravity driven by our shared values. As we have been driven further apart than ever before by the pressures of this global pandemic, many of us are left questioning about who we are and what we will become. Meanwhile, a new generation of people are entering and have entered the world of FOSS. With the arrival of these new members of our FOSS community comes new conflicts and contradictions—often intimate and familial in nature—in our collective communities.

In this session, speakers Justin W. Flory and Mike Nolan frame the development of FOSS culture and community as living in an intergenerational family and all that encompasses: the great, the bad, the lovely, and the ugly. They offer their own explorations into what makes the people of the Free and Open Source movement who they are. The exploration looks closely at aspects like mentorship, physical space, common values, and time for reflective communication to build a healthy family on the foundation of love, and how to think about the new generations discovering Free and Open Source for the first time.

Other people: Mike Nolan

Despite the number of working groups, advisory committees, and coordination roundtables, there is little progress towards creating more ethical and safe AI systems. AI systems are deployed in increasingly fragile contexts. From law enforcement to humanitarian aid, several organizations use AI powered systems to make or inform critical decisions with increasingly outsized side effects.

What is a rights-based approach for designing minimally safe and transparent guidelines for AI systems? In this talk, we explore what a Free AI system might look like. Then, taking research and guidelines from organizations such as Google and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, we propose practical policies and tools to ensure those building an AI system respect user freedom. Lastly, we propose the outlines of a new kind of framework where all derivative works also respect those freedoms.

Rights based approaches are commonly used within humanitarian contexts to approach problems that the sector faces. In this talk, we use the same approach to solving the issue of “unethical” AI systems. We do so by first defining a set of rights that we feel must be respected, proposing a number of methods that we feel helps ensure a system respects those rights, and lastly propose an organizational and regulatory framework that we feel could help encourage and enforce those methods be used by developers of AI systems.

Other people: Michael Nolan

One of the most well-known writers of literature, J.K. Rowling is a master of storytelling. What you might not have guessed is that open source and J.K. Rowling have something in common. The importance of storytelling in open source projects is as important as some of Rowling's famous characters in Harry Potter. In this session, speaker Justin W. Flory introduces the role of storytelling in open source projects and how to uncover that narrative. There a variety of tools and methods that can be used to help tell the story of project, particularly with data analysis. By the end audience members will understand the role of crafting the story of their open source project and how it motivates the community, what methods are available for writing this story, and what the outcome of focusing on storytelling results in.

J.K. Rowling has an ability to see a story and bring it to life through powerful methods of storytelling. But what you might not have guessed is that open source and J,K. Rowling both have something in common. The importance of storytelling in open source projects and communities is as important as some of Rowling's famous characters in Harry Potter. Finding ways to derive the story of a project community from lines of code, commit messages, and IRC conversations is a challenging but worthwhile task.

In this session, speaker Justin W. Flory introduces the role of storytelling in open source projects and how to best uncover that narrative. There are a variety of tools available to project communities to help them extract data to perform an analysis and mix of methods you can use regardless of what data you have available. Justin pulls from his experience as one of the founding members of the Fedora Community Operations team, working with team members with backgrounds in writing and data analysis, and the editor-in-chief of the Fedora Magazine.

By the end of the session, audience members will understand the role of crafting the story of their open source project and how it motivates the community, what methods are available for writing this story, and what the outcome of focusing on storytelling results in.